I’m currently reading yet another book on Christian belief that begins where the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed do: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” That starting point is both reasonable and traditional, but not necessarily helpful or true to the development of actual faith. It starts us off with questions of being and power, the power to create the universe out of nothing. From there, God becomes the Maker of all things and the Ground of Being, without a word yet spoken of redemptive love or hope. We begin with argument rather than encouragement, with telling rather than caring.

As a people, the children of Israel first came to know Yahweh God when they were enslaved in Egypt and oppressed with hard labor, when they had no freedom or social status. God entered onto the stage of human history as a God of slaves, identifying with the lowest of the lowly, and manifested what we might call God-ness in deliverance from that state of hopelessness. Some nobodies in the world became God’s own people. The hopeless were given hope, the enslaved set free, the worthless (by society’s accounting) accorded great value in the eyes of the God who adopted them and committed to journeying with them through life and history.

Only later, when there came time and need to reflect, did the children of Israel begin to understand their Savior God as also their Creator, and quite possibly not until the time of the Jews’ exile in Babylon was Yahweh established in their faith as the Creator of heaven and earth or, as we would say today, of the universe.